Deep and Wide Day 28 // Failure Isn’t Final

THE LOST ARE FOUND / THE FOUND ARE FREED / THE FREED ARE CONNECTED / THE CONNECTED ARE COMMISSIONED

28th May // Commissioned – Day 28 // Failure Isn’t Final

Reading – Exodus 2:11-3:22

Moses always knew God had called him to rescue the Israelite people. The burning bush wasn’t the moment Moses was commissioned. Long before that bush burned in the desert, his heart burned with the call of God on his life. Don’t believe me? Look at what Stephen says in his speech to the Sanhedrin in Acts 7:23-25. “When Moses was forty years old, he decided to visit his own people, the Israelites.He saw one of them being mistreated by an Egyptian, so he went to his defense and avenged him by killing the Egyptian.Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not.”

He knew right back in Egypt as a 40 year-old man that he was their rescuer, but his attempts to live that out failed dramatically and so he ran. That day when Moses fled to Midian he didn’t just run from the trouble he was in. No, carrying the burden of failure, he ran from the call of God on his life. The last we hear of him is Exodus 2:22 when he sets up home miles from where he belongs and starts a family.

It is decades later before the story is resumed in Exodus 3. The Bible is silent during that period because for decades there is nothing noteworthy to report. Moses had sat down and all of history awaited his rise back to his position.

You see while he may have failed, the calling of God had not. It still remained. So Yahweh searched him out in the desert. From within a bush he called to a much frailer Moses now 80 years old and worn down by regrets, and reminded him of who he was and what he had been called to do. And in that moment we learn something incredible about serving God – your first attempt doesn’t need to be your final attempt. Failure does not disqualify you from another ‘go’ at following God’s call on your life.

I don’t know what caused you to sit down and give up on serving God but I do know this, history waits for you to rise back to your position in the Kingdom. Today God calls you again, no matter how long you have been out of the race, and reminds you your first attempt to follow him should not have been your final attempt. It is time to get back up. You are still commissioned.